Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘If you . . .’ But Pinchas had already spent his small amount of capital, and his voice subsided again. ‘Most beautiful of all are the twin fawns grazing among the lilies.’

  ‘What kind of fawns?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pinchas whispered and turned bright red.

  ‘You wanted to explain to me . . .’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. What they are writing here—’

  ‘Just sit down! You’re making me nervous.’

  Pinchas squatted on the very edge of the tree trunk, where there was no danger of accidentally touching Mimi. But he could inhale her smell, of youth and sweat and something he couldn’t name. Pomeranzen – bitter oranges – must smell like that, a fruit that he had never tasted, but had looked up in the dictionary because of his name.

  ‘Nu?’ When Mimi grew impatient, she resembled her father more closely than she would have wished.

  ‘This article in the paper . . . Someone has put it there to damage Janki. So that no one buys from him.’

  ‘But if the rats . . .?’

  ‘Into fabrics they will creep.’ As soon as Pinchas was able to argue logically, he became noticeably more confident. ‘Which are so tightly rolled that they have to eat their way in. And you would see it in the fabric. No, no, the whole story is one big lie. Except: people will believe it.’

  ‘Why?’ There was something pleading in Mimi’s voice that touched Pinchas as if she had taken his hand.

  ‘They believe bad things about us. And: it’s a good story.’

  ‘You think that’s good?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I mean: a good invention. Do you love him?’ He hadn’t wanted to say that. It had escaped him like a bird, which one has thought long tamed, escaping from a cage.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Janki.’

  ‘Certainement pas!’ said Mimi and made her sharp face. ‘He really is meshuga,’ she thought.

  ‘Because: if that’s the case, I would try to help him.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pinchas and had to bend very low to examine his socks for holes. ‘Because I would also be helping you. And for you . . .’

  ‘Nu?’

  Pinchas knew exactly how the sentence would have continued. But the last remains of his small courage were used up, and all that he could utter was: ‘My mother doesn’t like darning socks. She prefers baking cakes.’ Which, as he reproached himself again and again throughout a long, sleepless night, Solomon would doubtless have left out of his Song of Songs.

  After such a sentence you can only get up, walk away and never come back. He left the newspaper on the ground and didn’t once look up when he, slouching along on a single slipper, set off on the endless journey home. Had his mother baked honey cakes? He would never be able to eat another honey cake as long as he lived.

  When Janki came at last, it was almost dark. He moved as he had often done as a soldier, like an automaton, without a will of his own, impelled only by habit. His head was bowed and he walked straight ahead. Only sometimes, if a dandelion grew in the middle of the road, did he swerve to behead it with a kick. Mimi called him, and he stopped, as an exhausted army unit stops and waits for the next command: if it comes, you will carry it out, if not, you can stay like that until the end of time.

  ‘How was it?’ asked Mimi, although the back of his bent neck already told her the answer.

  ‘If no customers come tomorrow, that will be twice as much as today.’ He had thought of that sentence as a brave joke, but on the way from Baden to Endingen any humour had been stifled in the dust from the road.

  ‘That newspaper article . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janki. ‘That newspaper article. I didn’t hear a single shot in the whole war, and now I’m being killed with newsprint.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  Janki spread his arms, further and further, as if he wanted to take off and fly away. ‘There are enough stables in the world,’ he said at last. ‘There is always room for someone who can hold a pitchfork. Then, in response to a command that he alone had heard, he set off once more, left, right, left, right. When he passed Mimi, his shoulders were weighed down as if by a kitbag.

  Mimi ran after him. ‘Here! A letter came for you. From Paris!’

  Janki slit open the seal and unfolded the paper very slowly, a condemned man without hope that his request for pardon will be heard. He read the letter, nodded, nodded again, and on his face there appeared the same expression that the dead sometimes wore when their sinews contract and it looks as if they are laughing.

  ‘That fits,’ said Janki. ‘Monsieur Delormes is dead.’

  During the siege of Paris, François Delormes had eaten his fill. He knew a lot of diplomats and officers, and a man has as few secrets from his tailor as he does from his valet. François Delormes had known more than many others what was about to happen in Paris, and he had prepared himself. In the private dressing room reserved for the best customers, he had installed a shelf and filled it over the weeks, with bottles of wine, of course, champagne that makes the heart beat faster, and Burgundy that warms it, but above all with the delicacies that would soon cease to exist, foie gras from the Périgord, in yellow tins that gleamed like the purest gold, oval terrines, in which pheasants and hares slumbered under layers of fat as they awaited their resurrection, baskets of oranges and lemons, sugarloafs lined up side by side, with blue ribbons around their bellies, court officials before a state banquet waiting for the guests to arrive. On the stands, where in times of peace the hangers with half-finished clothes had jostled, there now hung whole hams and sides of bacon, fat sausages from the Ardennes and thin ones from the Belgian border. When the besieging army encircled the city and the roar of the cannons became louder and louder, François Delormes dismissed all his employers, the cutters and the seamstresses, the old ironing ladies and the young girls with the slender fingers who had sewn on the sequins for the evening gowns. He shut himself away in his studio, and while Paris starved he sat alone in his town house on the Rue de Rivoli and ate. When he was found, the leg of a confit guinea fowl was still stuck in his throat; in his greed he had tried to swallow it, all at once.

  There was nothing of any of this in the letter, only that the writers regretted to inform Monsieur Jean Meijer that Maître François Delormes had not survived the siege of his city, and that Monsieur Meijer would unfortunately have to start his new business, for which, incidentally, they wished him the very best of luck, without a letter of recommendation. The letter was signed by one Paul-Marc Lemercier, whom Janki remembered as a dry accountant, and to whom the firm now apparently belonged.

  ‘That fits,’ said Janki bitterly. ‘That fits precisely.’

  Dinner time had passed long ago, but there was still a plate ready for Janki on the table. Chanele had kept some soup warm, which, if hours passed and the soup was to stay tasty, represented a lot of effort, but when Janki just sat there and didn’t even touch his spoon, she didn’t press him and asked no questions. It was Mimi who told her at last what had happened, not mentioning Pinchas once, and reacting furiously. Salomon wanted to know since when she read the papers.

  ‘I’m not a child any more!’ she said, thinking, ‘You have no idea how little of a child I am.’

  ‘People will forget,’ Golde said consolingly, and didn’t believe her fine words herself.

  Salomon stroked his whiskers, shook his head and said thoughtfully, ‘If it is said that a famer has had the plague in his byre—’

  ‘This isn’t about farmers!’ Chanele cut in, Chanele who never normally involved herself in family discussions. ‘It’s about Janki.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll make my own way. That is: I’ll make some sort of way. Somewhere.’ As he sat there so dejectedly, behind Janki’s narrow face one could sense the gaunt bird-like head that he would one day have as an old man.

  ‘They’ll forget,’ Golde repeated. ‘They’ll definitely forget.’

  ‘Why?�
��

  Uncle Melnitz, whom no one had thought about while all the changes and plans of the past few weeks were going on, pushed his chair closer to the table. He was, as always, dressed all in black, and he enjoyed, as always, his own pessimism.

  ‘Why should they forget? They never forget anything. The more absurd it is, the more clearly they remember it. Just as they remember that we slaughter little children, always before Pesach, and bake their blood in matzohs. It’s never happened, but even five hundred years later they can tell you how we did it. How we enticed the little boy from his parents, how we promised him presents or chocolate, long before chocolate existed. They know every detail.

  ‘They can describe to you the knife we used, as precisely as if they’d held it in their own hands. They know where we made the cut, at the throat or above the heart, they know what the bowl looks like, the one we caught the blood in, every year, everywhere, because matzohs aren’t kosher without Christian blood. They know it all. They can tell you the name of the child, quite precisely. It says so on the saints’ calendar. It’s never happened, but they remember, they have a grave that they visit, an altar, and on feast days they stove in a few Jewish heads by way of commemoration.

  ‘Forget? They forget nothing. The truths, perhaps, but not the lies. They still know the stories that the Babylonians and the Romans came up with against us, and they tell those stories and they believe them. Sometimes they say, “We are modern people so we know that none of that is true,” but they still don’t stop believing in it. It’s stuck firmly in their heads. Lies have a lot of barbs, they surely do.

  ‘Sometimes you won’t hear the lie for a few years, but it’s just sleeping then and collecting its strength. Until somewhere a child disappears, or someone remembers a child that did. Then it’s wide awake again. Then we’re holding the knife in our hands again, the long, sharp knife, then we gather in a circle again with our beards and our crooked noses, then we stab away again, and the child goes on screaming, the poor, innocent, fair-haired child, and we go on laughing as we always laugh, and the blood flows into the bowl again, and again we bake it into our matzohs, and everything is as it was. They don’t forget.

  ‘They can name the passages in the Talmud that aren’t in it, and which they’ve all read anyway. They know our commandments, which don’t exist, very precisely, they know them better than their own. Forget? Do you really think they forget anything?’

  Janki’s soup had gone cold long ago, but they were all still sitting around the table, sitting straight on their chairs and not looking at each other. Only Uncle Melnitz had made himself comfortable, had spread himself out and leaned back like someone who has decided to stay for a long time. He talked and talked.

  No one listened to him.

  Everyone tried not to listen to him.

  8

  Then Janki did go back to Baden, hopelessly, as one plays to the end a game one has lost, just to count up the points that one will have to pay. To general surprise Chanele went with him. She needed to buy something, she explained, and besides, she hadn’t been in Baden for ages, and had an unclaimed day off. Salomon couldn’t contradict her on this one, because if one wanted to look at it in those terms, Chanele had never had a day off; she was seen as a member of the family, and for that reason she wasn’t paid a wage.

  The two walked side by side in silence, so quickly that they repeatedly passed other, slower walkers, a peasant woman with a basket full of chickens, or a basket-maker balancing all his goods piled high on his back. As he marched, Janki kept his eyes fixed firmly forward, and yet he could have described quite precisely what Chanele was wearing: a brown dress of a fabric which was known in Paris as ‘paysanne’, and which Monsieur Delormes only bought so that he could give a few metres of it to a washer-woman or a seamstress. The fabric was too heavy to fall really loosely, but the tailor – if it had not been Chanele herself – had brought out the waist so skilfully that the skirt puffed out in a bell-like shape at the hips, and swung with every step she took. The round neckline and the sleeves were trimmed with something that looked at first sight like lace, but which was only folded white batist, a material that was normally used for petticoats and night-shirts, for everything, Janki had learned that touches the skin directly.

  Chanele’s petticoat, he was sure, was bound to be of less fine a material, and her blouse . . .

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble,’ he said. ‘I would have been happy to bring you whatever it is that you need.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Chanele replied. And then, ten or twenty paces later, ‘It’s something that men know nothing about.’

  Her hair was, as always, rolled up in a bun and pushed into a net. For the journey she had put on a headscarf and sometimes, because she needed to cool down or was lost in thoughts, she put her hand to the back of her neck and lifted the bundle of hair a little as if to test its weight. Janki’s father had always done that with his money bag when the last farmer had gone and he wanted to assess his takings.

  Janki tried to imagine how long Chanele’s hair might be, whether when she combed it it reached to her belt or even further, and whether in bed at night . . .

  ‘It could be a hot day,’ he said.

  ‘Even hotter if you have to iron the laundry,’ she said.

  Chanele walked at the same pace as he did, left, right, left, right, without, as most women would have done, tripping along after his long soldier’s stride. She must have had powerful legs, and yet, to judge by the slenderness of her arms, they were certainly not thick. You could imagine that Chanele . . .

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

  Janki had to reflect for a moment before he remembered why he was travelling to Baden.

  ‘He could just as easily have stayed here and learned something from me,’ said Salomon Meijer. He was sitting at the table in the sitting room and had set out a fat book and a stack of papers and notes. ‘This business about blood lines is an extremely interesting matter.’

  Golde, the hard working woman, considered Salomon’s big project of drawing up the definitive family tree of all the Simmental cows kept in the district to be impractical nonsense, but she didn’t contradict her husband. But as they had been married for a long time, Salomon still responded to her reservations.

  ‘If I ever finish it . . .’

  ‘If,’ thought Golde.

  ‘. . . one will be able to predict whether a cow is worth something even before it is born. And not only me, but someone who hasn’t the first notion about beheimes. Like Janki, for example.’

  ‘He isn’t even interested in it.’

  ‘He will be. He can forget all about his drapery store, that meshugas. But he has a head on his shoulders, and if he involved himself in the cattle trade . . .’

  ‘Do you think he really likes Mimi?’ Golde had skipped over a whole chain of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’, but she had only arrived at the spot where Salomon was already.

  ‘If he isn’t an idiot . . .’ said Salomon Meijer.

  ‘No,’ said Golde, ‘an idiot he isn’t.’

  They could talk as openly as this because Mimi had gone for a walk again. ‘You’ve been going for lots of walks lately,’ Salomon had grumbled, but then he had decided not to enquire into the matter any further. He wouldn’t have received an answer, or at least not an honest one. Because Mimi’s path took her not into the countryside but into the middle of the village, to a door that she normally avoided if possible, to a very surprised Sarah Pomeranz.

  Mimi had set out very precisely the story she wanted to tell: how her father had claimed she couldn’t even make an omelette without burning it – he had actually once said something similar – and how she had then planned to surprise him, to prove her culinary arts, with a home-made cake. ‘It will have to be a very special cake,’ she was going to say, ‘a cake for King Solomon in person. I only know one person in Endingen who can give me the recipe for such a cake, so . . .’ But when Sarah opened the door, swat
hed in an aura of rosewater and bubbling oil, her concerns about Janki were greater than all her plans, and Mimi only said impatiently, ‘Where is Pinchas?’

  ‘Where do you think? In the shop.’

  There can hardly be a less favourable moment to meet the woman you dream about every night than when you are precooking cow’s intestines. Your hands aren’t just dirty, they’re repellently slippery, you look like an old maid because you’ve tied a cloth around your hair so that the smell doesn’t linger in it, and worst of all you can’t interrupt your work. Intestines precooked for too long fall apart and can’t be used for sausages.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ said Pinchas, ‘but . . .’

  ‘Don’t stop!’ He bent obediently over the steaming pot and stirred around with a big paddle with holes in it, the kind also used in laundries. The steam had covered all the surfaces with a pattern of tiny drops.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we waited until . . .?’ asked Pinchas.

  But Mimi felt that she had a mission, and a mission can’t wait. Not even if there’s a sickly, rotten stench in the air and you’ve just stepped in some yellowish-green sludge. ‘First of all,’ she said, just as she had planned to on the journey, ‘first of all’ – she had at last found a relatively clean spot where one could stand without touching anything – ‘first of all one thing must be clear: nothing can come of us. Ever.’

  ‘But . . .’ said Pinchas.’

  ‘Never.’ Mimi felt like a character in a novel.

  ‘What if my father lends me the money for the pivot tooth?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with that.’

  ‘I fell because I was reading as I walked, and tripped. That’s how I knocked my tooth out. But with a pivot tooth . . .’

  ‘Enough about your wretched pivot tooth!’ The conversation wasn’t going as Mimi had planned.

  ‘I know it looks ugly.’

  ‘You’re not ugly.’

  ‘Do you really think so, Miriam?’

  It wasn’t easy to tell through the clouds of steam, but Mimi actually had a sense that Pinchas was blushing.